Comment by senko
7 hours ago
If this sounds like basic advice, consider there are a lot of people out there that believe they have to start with serverless, kubernetes, fleets of servers, planet-scale databases, multi-zone high-availability setups, and many other "best practices".
Saying "you can just run things on a cheap VPS" sounds amateurish: people are immediately out with "Yeah but scaling", "Yeah but high availability", "Yeah but backups", "Yeah but now you have to maintain it" arguments, that are basically regurgitated sales pitches for various cloud platforms. It's learned helplessness.
“Cloud-native natives” had so much free plans that had no need to understand what a basic app really needs.
And now big tech often doesn't even have the high availability to show for all that complexity.
The better availability and scalability of “the cloud” always relied on so many things being done and maintained just right by just the right people that I don’t think it’s ever been broadly true.
You get such a large performance malus and increase in complexity right from the start with The Cloud that it’ starts at a serious deficit, and only eventually maybe overcomes that to be overall beneficial with the right workload, people, and processes. Most companies are lacking minimum two of those to justify “the cloud”.
And that’s without even considering the cost.
What I think it actually is, is a way for companies that can’t competently (I mean at an organizational/managerial level) maintain and adequately make-available computing resources, to pay someone else to do it. They’re so bad at that, that they’re willing to pay large costs in money, performance, and maybe uptime to get it.
Apparently the phrase cargo cult software engineering is not common anymore. Explains these things perfectly.
I end up explaining this term to every junior developer that doesn't know it sooner or later, the same way I explain bike shedding to all PMs that don't know it... often sooner, rather than later.
It seems to really help if you can put a term to it.
Heh, I was gonna say cargo cult might mean something different in today’s programming landscape but then I thought about it for a second and it actually reinforces th meaning.
I don't know what to say. People keep saying these engineers exist and here I am not having seen a single, and I follow many indie hackers communities.
A devops coworker found my blog and asked me how I host it, is it Kubernetes. I told him it's a dedicated server and he seemed amazed. And this was just a blog. It's real
Does your coworker run a blog on k8s?
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Because I think precisely the indie hacker community is not as keen to default to the big-tech stacks, because those are neither indie, nor hack-y :)
I've worked at a startup that could've trivially ran on a single VPS and kept things simple yet had a dedicated infra guy using a full k8s setup.
hey - devs aren' the only ones who fall in the premature optimization trap! Everyone from the CTO envisioning the scale of their future startup down to the IT intern is influenced by this, plus it's in the best interest of a dedicated infra guy to have a lot of dedicated infra. If you don't manage people K8s can become your kingdom and the size a badge of importance.
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How else are you going to put k8s on your CV? :-P